Love A.D.D.erall
At 21 they diagnosed me with AD/HD & gave me smart pills. My grades shot up & my future brightened & some said I was better. But I am numb inside of this drug. People I love become distant strangers sometimes, so proud of me for victories I didn’t earn. How do I tell them I am not what I do or have done. I’ll never be happy on this drug, but I’ll never be successful without it. If only I could Love Adderall.Archive for adult ADD
Changing the World is an Unmarketable Plan
As I near completion of my Ph.D. I feel no closer to accomplishing goals than I was when I graduated college. Back then I didn’t know myself well enough to understand the most unique thing about me: that financial success alone can never be enough for me. Sometimes I genuinely miss being that simplified person.
Coming full-circle does not appear that it will produce the sense of purpose I’ve been coveting. When I got my B.A. four years ago I felt unqualified to do pretty much anything that paid the salary I wanted. But that hurdle would have been much easier to clear than the one impeding me now. It’s easier to be rich with cash than it is to be rich inside.
After spending the better part of my twenties on overstuffed university campuses, I’m eager to remove myself permanently from “college towns.”
It is not that the people who inhabit these communities are inherently unintelligent–many of them explain the inaccessible BCS formula with the informed precision of the seasoned statisticians who derived it. But finding anyone who has something substantive to say requires a bit more rummaging. It seems the parts of our brains that actively and passionately seek new information are switched into “hibernate” mode when there is a sports team to cheer for or a trendy bar in which serious drinking is in order.
Thus, by and large, the only people in academe who like talking about politics or world affairs are the professors who work here. Limiting my intellectual development to the whims and fancies of my so-called “mentors” has stifled it in many ways. The same social science that “opened” my mind as an undergraduate has fought during my grad school years to keep it at bay (only slightly ajar).
Open minds and critical thought are (supposedly) desirable. But once a student obtains these tools, using them to pursue paths he or she finds meaningful is taught to be rather superfluous endeavor (in the minds of the vast majority of social science professors I’ve encountered). The goal instead is to publish research articles in obscure academic journals which literally nobody (not even our professional colleagues) bothers to read.
So if you want to find yourself in graduate school–if you want to explore other ways of using your newfound knowledge in addition to (or in lieu of) preaching to fellow-academics in half-empty hotel conference rooms–you’re on your own.
The presumed academic objective to mold students into productive human beings has been uniquely tweaked by most professors in my discipline. In a profession that sacrifices monetary reward in exchange for power and prestige, one of your prized accomplishments is to have successful students who are ready and willing to carry on your work in your name. For many mentors, including the one who recently kicked my ass to the curb, the only incentive to assist students on their intellectual journey is the prospect that one day the student might publish a profound book–at which point the protégé (forever labeled as “Dr. so-and-so’s student”) will solidify the mentor’s intellectual immortality.
I’ve heard several professors use the phrase “investing in a student” to refer to a scholar’s decision to mentor an understudy. If one doesn’t fit the academic mold then there is no particular incentive for anyone in academia to “invest” in that student, just like you wouldn’t buy a rusty old car if someone offered a shiny new one at the same price.
Many students are weeded out via this mechanism; without much fanfare, these students tend to leave the academic world and pursue meaningful work outside of it. Like pledges blackballed from fraternities, the discarded students will never again have anything positive to say about about the ivory tower. The professors, willingly oblivious to the inherent functionality of their own system, internalize the notion that those students they’ve discarded were unprofessional, unfocused, or untalented.
What ends up becoming of all those students for whom the goal of “advancing disciplinary knowledge” was simply too pointless. Some of them flow smoothly into society; others will forever get caught on it’s snags and cumbersome obstacles. Rest assured however, few egos can survive the incessant bashing that befalls students that are too bright and dynamic for their own good. And alas rather than use their dreams to change the world for the better, they must sit by and watch as the world changes their dreams for the worse.
The Futures of My Past
Once we were young & willing and waiting to inhale. Everything we had inside us laughed at life with a nervous energy that still believed life could be tamed & conquered, even defeated. Youth hung on our faces like pimples waiting to pop. The future was a redwood and I worshiped it from my bedroom window.
In those days people told us we could become anything, and we believed them. I used to say I’d be making six figures by the time I was twenty-five; friends would gaze in jealous admiration at my kick-ass report cards and believe me; adults would nod approvingly as if mastering geometry was a worthwhile achievement and earning six figures a worthy goal.
Then slowly the backyard leaves evacuated the trees inside me. Men came with hardhats & sharp, loud tools; they tore down my hopes that any compatibility might exist between the things I wanted and the things I wanted to do. Doubt & disparity rose like a charismatic dictators who bring hope to ailing countries in which living is less important than believing. And finally dreams toppled like deadwood giving way to chainsaws—trees could never rival swimming pools inside the duplex families new to excessive white living.
Could it really be that ten years have gone by? Whose unsatisfied eyes are those that scowl at me from the crying mirror?
It’s been some time now since the daydreams have stopped keeping me afloat. Today lines forge across my skin like involuntary rivers rerouting to accommodate new colonies. People no longer promise me I can be “anything”; now they say “get a real job” and they roll their eyes at my lazy alibis. And even as I do the things I’m supposed to want to need to do, I can’t shake this feeling that something else–or maybe everything else–is more important.
It is.
Taking It Up The Tailpipe!
Let’s begin today’s impulsive, childish rant by recapping four symptoms of A.D.D., according to leading scholar Edward Hallowell and all the experts:
- Misplacing/losing/forgetting things.
- Trouble going through established channels.
- Inability/refusal to repeat situations that have been frustrating in the past.
- Inability to learn or even tolerate the mundane and that which is not stimulating.
On their own these symptoms are relatively benign; but taken together they are deadly, as my present predicament shows.
I am about 65% sure I’ve lost my debit card, and about 15% sure its lost somewhere in my clutter, and about 2o% sure its waiting for me in some bar somewhere. On the off chance that one of the latter two is the case, I’ve hesitated to close my account and pay the bank–which is already an extremely shady bank, as all are–to replace my card.
So today I got a mini-statement and of course the fucking bank is so cheap the damn mini-statements won’t even tell me where the money was spent, just when. About $200.00 was spent on my card on 9/4/07, but I’m not sure if it was me who spent it or some sonofabitch who stole my card. I needed to see where the transactions took place, so that I could see if the venue sounded familiar and thus gain some clue as to whether my card is lost or whether it is stolen. I tried to sign up for online banking, but that took literally over an hour because I’m too impatient to sit and read the prompts… I just scan my computer screen for something that looks like a button that says “continue” or “next” or “yes” and I just click it. So I guess I kept clicking the wrong buttons because I kept having passwords that didn’t match or “required fields” left empty or some similar shit.
Finally I got all situated: signed up for the online banking. When I went to view my recent transactions I was at first pleasantly surprised to see the mysterious 9/4 transactions had disappeared. But so had other ones–transactions I know that I made. This inevitably led to yet another safari through the disorganized FAQs until I found the following FAQ:
- QUESTION: Is some transaction history not showing for your accounts?
- ANSWER: Here’s how we gather transaction history: For checking, savings and money markets, we gather 90 days of history for you the day after you set up your CompassPC service, so there won’t be any history prior to that time.
I can view my transactions from 2006, but I can’t view the ones from last week to ascertain where the fuck I or some stranger went berserk with my debit card. Thanks a lot, Compass. AND they made me use Internet Explorer to set up my account, because they said Mozilla was unsafe. There is not a soul on this planet who finds IE better than Mozilla, but Bill Gates sure does have a lot more money than Mozilla’s creators, meaning my bank is more than happy to prostitute itself out at the expense of its customers.
So now I know there are all these established channels I’m supposed to go through, but I know where that leads. First of all, my loved ones who could and should be there for me will get irritated and fed up almost instantly; and they’ll decide I need to be lectured and judged rather than helped. So knowing I can’t turn their without getting bitchslapped and verbally emasculated I won’t even try. Another logical option would be to go back into the bank, and to rap with the bank clerk about my situation. But I’ve been there, too, and here’s how that will go: In the process of seeking help I’ll fail to use the proper, conventional bank jargon terms that everyone east of Midway Island had the patience to familiarize themselves with when they were like seven. But because my bank literacy is that of a four-year-old, the douche bag behind the counter will treat me as if I’m one notch below the homeless. And then I’ll have to break his nose for him, or (best-case scenario) act like a petty child and rattle off everything in the world that I’m better at than bank clerks, which would only lead to more lecturing and more people judging me.
So to be quite honest, as absurd as this probably sounds to you who don’t understand me, I think what I’m going to do is absolutely nothing, to “piss and moan like an impotent jerk and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!” much like Jim Carey’s character did in the following “Liar, Liar” clip:
The plan is to cross my fingers and hope whoever ended up with my card threw it away when it bottomed out last week–under the assumption that I was responsible enough to cancel it. Then I’ll just make deposits and withdrawals from now on and bag the ATM until I switch banks. The thought of filling out bureaucratic paper work and having to go through the established channels and looking/feeling stupid and having to go through a whole frustrating, boring, annoying process just to get my money back–that’s too excruciating.
Besides, losing money isn’t half as frustrating as the feeling that nobody in my life can understand just how impossible it is for me to stay on top of mundane, everyday tasks.
“Gifted Adults”
Mary-Elaine Jacobsen’s ‘The Gifted Adult’ is about “Liberating Everyday Genius” (also its former title). One of the author’s main goals is “to provide a bridge between this society’s expectations of how we ought to behave in the gifted personality, so that we can understand that it is the desire of the gifted person to live authentically and not suppress the ‘First Nature’ traits that produced what some consider aberrant behavior” (p. 12). Although this book is not about (and does not even mention) attention deficit disorder, I suspect many of the folks Jacobsen calls “gifted adults” also suffer from A.D.D.
I’ve only read about a chapter sop far. Given my inability to finish the things I start, I doubt I’ll get around to finishing this book. But I found several passages from the first chapter to be meaningful, inspiring, and personally relevant:
- “To feel like an outsider, to constantly pressure yourself to hold back your gifts in order to fit in or avoid disapproval, to erroneously believe that you are overly sensitive, compulsively perfectionistic, and blindly driven, to live without knowing the basic truths about the core of your being–too often this is the life of every day geniuses who have been kept in the dark about who they are and misinformed about their differences… No one told them they cannot escape the fact that they will always be quantitatively, qualitatively, and motivationally different from most other people. Nor do they know that these very same things that are the basis of criticism are fundamental building blocks of excellence and advanced development” (p. 17).
- “John’s high energy posed a threat to others when he dominated conversations, used words as weapons, and posed potentially embarrassing questions. John was raw and overstimulated… He openly defied authority and ducked responsibility for his choices” (p. 13).
- “To someone like John, the rest of the world… is lagging behind. From people walking too slowly on sidewalks and those counting out exact change in a supermarket checkout line to others arriving at a solution that seemed obvious to John minutes, days, or sometimes weeks before, everyone else always seemed to be moving at a glacial pace” (p. 7).
- “The world’s a blender on stir and I’m on liquefy” (p. 6).
- “(Gifted adults) have a vague awareness that the root of their problems is far deeper than surface symptoms. They realize they are intense, driven, and complex, but they have been taught that their strong personalities are excessive, too different from the norm, and consequently wrong. In a culture that often equates different with wrong, it’s inevitable that gifted adults point a critical finger toward themselves as the source of their discontent: Why can’t I just be like everyone else? Shouldn’t I have outgrown this type of identity crisis by now? Why can’t I (overcome) this nagging sense of urgency? Will I ever feel satisfied? What’s wrong with me?” (p. 10).
- “For too long the most ardent desire of many (gifted adults) has been to find out what’s wrong with them and fix it. (Instead), every individual should find out what is right with him or her and manage it” (p. 16).
- “Ann lowered her standards to conform and began to distrust herself and her intuition… She had always been consumed by the projects she undertook, and when she wasn’t rewarded in proportion to her efforts, she became indifferent…” (p. 13).
- “(Everyone else) is moving along at twenty-four frames per second, normal film speed, but to me that’s slow motion” (p. 6).
- “One way to think of (the natural traits of gifted adults) is to compare them to hand preference. Unless we have suffered some accident that has rendered our dominant hand useless, we don’t think much about the subject area. Yet, like the (natural traits) of the gifted, our handedness has a major influence on how we negotiate our way in the world. And like those well-intentioned teachers and family members who once forced left-handers to abandon that and use the naturally dominant hand, gifted adults often experience the same kind of treatment” (p. 12)
- “The only way to manifest what is norm for someone with such a highly sensitive sensory apparatus and vision of how things ought to be in a world that seems radically out of sync is to be intense, complex, and driven. As Abraham Maslow pointed out, we are all driven by the urge to meet our needs. What if one of our most fundamental needs is to have things be just so? What do we do if our precise sense of proportion sets off an alarm in our heads when the figures we’ve drawn are slightly skewed? We stop, assess, and start over, again and again, until we get it right. And we don’t do this so much by choice but because of a mandate from somewhere both inside and outside of ourselves” (p. 11).
Even if her entire book is bullshit (as her deliberately eye-catching “Are you a Gifted Adult?” sticker on the cover implies) a lot of Jacobsen’s stuff hits pretty close to home for me. It’s comforting to find there’s also an affirming aspect to being so different!
